The morning of the meet up Natsuko was hungover, again.

“Where do you even find people to pay for you?” Shuixing asked, helping her friend’s stiff body up from the floor of the cramped laboratory closet.

“Klaus, man, he likes, ow—” Natsuko shielded her eyes from the windows Shuixing opened. “—He likes when numbers go up. Specifically my tab.”

“I would’ve thought he preferred when that number went down,” Shuixing replied.

“He knows I’m good for it. Usually.”

Sofiane was already at the town gate when they arrived, where he was flirting with Rose, the aptly-named florist.

“Madame, how devilish of you to steal the center stage of your own bouquet,” Sofiane said with a flourished bow.

“O-Oh, erm… thank you?” the confused Non-Hero replied.

He grasped the hand not holding a basket of flowers and kissed it. “How have you hidden yourself in such a backwater town, mademoiselle? Like a water lily, your beauty sprouts from amongst the muck.”

“I-I’m sorry, w-who are you?” Rose asked.

Natsuko slapped him hard on the back, snapping him out of the bow.

“He’s an idiot,” Natsuko said.

“See you later Rose,” Shuixing said.

“Erm, bye then,” the florist said, scurrying on.

Sofiane put his hands on his hips. “Am I to be denied what little pleasure there is to be found in this pissant town?”

Natsuko plunked her bottle down on the cobblestone street and rested against it without responding. As far as she was concerned, this was her town. No one was going to go around bothering the Non-Heroes except for her. And maybe Shuixing. And with that, they waited another half an hour for Pechorin to show up during which time Sofiane and Natsuko started up a game of hangman in the dust.

“S!” Natsuko said.

Sofiane drew a leg on the hanged man in the dirt next to the road with his rapier. “Nope!”

“What!? You’ve gotta be screwing with me. Eleven spaces, no vowels, and no S’s!? Bullshit. You’re lying.”

He grinned. “Your lexical ignorance is no concern of mine.”

Natsuko turned to her friend. “Shui, he’s screwing with me, right? Come on, you’re smart. There’s no eleven-letter word with no vowels in it, right?”

Shuixing untucked her hands from her robe sleeves and rubbed her chin. “Hmm? I’m a scientist, not a linguist. I don’t necessarily know a lot of big words outside my specialized jargon.”

“But it’s gotta be—”

“Finish your damned turn!” Sofiane said.

“Fine, ‘R’. Are there any ‘R’s?” Natsuko said.

“Nope! You lose."

“Alright, puffball, what is it?”

With the dexterity of a master calligrapher, Sofiane spelled out the word “twyndyllyng” in the dirt with his rapier in cursive, all while looking exceedingly proud of himself.

“That’s not a word!” Natsuko said, pointing at the offending set of characters. “That’s gobbledygook!”

“It’s an archaic word for “twin”,” he explained.

The mention of archaic made Shuixing feel uncomfortably fuzzy again. Archaic… Who had invented it then, if the world had only existed in this form for five years? The Yishang said there was a time before the summoning of Heroes, and that it had been shrouded in a timeless, entropic Mist that their rivals, the Entropic Axis, was trying to reinstate. Did she exist in that entropic state? She couldn’t imagine it. As she unsuccessfully pondered this, Pechorin finally arrived, fashionably late.

“Oh gods-damned it, you didn’t say it was him we were waiting for!” Natsuko said.

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

“You didn’t tell her who gave us the tip?” Sofiane asked a guilty-looking Shuixing.

“Hehe, well…”

Shuixing had fully anticipated this. Dormant for several years, she still had the instinctual knowledge of how to coax their dysfunctional team into working together. For Natsu that meant tricking her into being up and ready by making going back to sleep more effort than staying up. For Pechorin, that meant promising Natsu would be there.

“Anyway, let’s get going, shall we? Seize the day!” Shuixing said.

“Fine. But I’m not talking to him,” Natsuko said.

“Nor I her,” Pech said.

“Like quarreling twyndyllyngs,” said Sofiane.

The dungeon that supposedly contained the Cursed Demon’s Eye—or Eye of the Cursed Demon—was located near the edge of the great land bridge that linked the region of Vermögenburgh to Shuixing’s "homeland" of Tianzhou. Mephistopheles' Tomb was the last of the dungeons to be discovered back when the Mist encompassed everywhere but Vermögenburgh. By all accounts, it should have been picked clean, and now contained only monsters so pitifully easy to defeat that the experience gained wasn’t worth the effort. According to Pechorin, that was exactly why the Eye of the Cursed Demon had been overlooked.

“It was hiding in plain sight the entire time,” he said as they walked along the sandy shores of Lake Burnhithe. Far off in the distance were the mountains of Hammertal Canyon. Ahead of them lay the dark fir forest that ringed the edges of Vermögenburgh. Further beyond were the sand-swept roads along the marshy isthmus to Tianzhou. Further still, at the very edge of their sight, were the steep, pillar-like, unmistakably Tianzhounese mountains of the Buxia rift.

“Plain sight?” Shuixing asked. “We’ve been in Mephistopheles’ Tomb several times together Pechorin, you never said anything before.”

“It was revealed to me in a vision,” he replied.

“Shove it up your ass,” Natsuko said. “You made it up, didn't you?”

Sofiane hummed. “Actually… I think I’ve heard of what monsieur Pechorin is talking about. There was supposed to be some room in the dungeon that seems inaccessible but, under certain circumstances, can be accessed.”

As if on cue, the wind picked up Pechorin’s long, charcoal-black hair and made it wave dramatically. “The forbidden chamber.”

Natsuko folded her arms. “Which you named yourself, I’m sure.”

“So you know a way inside?” Sofiane asked.

“It was revealed to me.”

“In a vision?”

“In my tortured, fitful dreams.”

“You slept like a rock every night,” Natsuko said.

Pechorin ignored her, instead toying with the chambers of his guns as though in preparation for some great battle. Shuixing giggled. She supposed she ought to be taking it as seriously as he was, but truthfully she wasn’t expecting much from the trip. For her this was an outing with an old friend. Sofiane, however, was far more enthusiastic. Drugged by the sweet narcosis of optimism, the Cursed Demon’s Eye—or Eye of the Cursed Demon—had, in his head, turned into an ultimate secret weapon capable of anything and everything. It might as well have raised Use-Numbers single-handedly. Meanwhile, Natsuko was hungover still because Shuixing was trying to teach her a lesson, which put her in a bad mood.

“Hold up, who’s that?” Sofiane said, drawing his rapier.

They could hear in the distance the voices of men and women speaking to each other excitedly. It was precisely the kind of joviality that everyone but Natsuko was sharing (and Pechorin was pretending to be too brooding for). And the voices were coming from the entrance to Mephistopheles’s Tomb.

“Strange. I recognize some of the voices,” Shuixing said.

“Harald,” Pechorin said. “And Margaret.”

“Who?” Sofiane asked.

“2nd-gen Heroes,” Natsuko said flatly. “All just as forgotten as us, apparently.”

Sofiane narrowed his eyes. “I cannot say I am too fond of their being here. You haven’t told anyone else about the Eye of the Cursed Demon, have you?”

Pechorin shook his head and drew both pepperbox guns from their holsters. “Not unless I have murmured strange and arcane things in my sleep.”

“Again, like a rock,” Natsuko said.

The dark woods parted to reveal a stony clearing with a granite sepulcher in the middle. A small camp was set up outside with four people standing around it, all unmistakably Heroes by their well-defined aesthetic choices and unique weapons. Their conversation stopped as four rivals entered the clearing.

“Guess we didn’t move fast enough,” Harald said, shrugging in his bear pelt coat and gathering up a thick-handled halberd with runes carved into its steel blade.

“You’re looking for the Eye of the Cursed Demon too?” Sofiane asked, purple electricity crackling around his sword-wielding hand.

“If by that you mean the Cursed Demon’s Eye,” Margaret said, “then yeah. And I think you should walk away and let us have it, little girl.”

“I’m not going to take that from some 2nd-gen nobody,” Sofiane said.

“Is sharing possible?” Shuixing asked. Everyone looked at her like she was crazy.

“They are not the Cursed Demon’s Eyes plural, I am afraid,” Pechorin said.

Something about the tense atmosphere told Shuixing not to ask how they themselves were supposed to share it. The shadows at Pechorin’s feet had already begun to plume like a smoking fire. The other two beside Harald and Margaret, a dark-eyed woman with raccoon ears and a bandolier of flasks across her chest, and a sharp-jawed man in a long gown and headscarf wielding a whip, readied themselves for combat.

Sofiane turned to Natsuko. “Maybe now would be a good time to tell them what your wine bottle does?”